I assume most people who use XP (which by default means non-hobbyists) are using it to run some software that was made to run only on it and the people who made said software never bothered to update the software for another OS. Something like a software application to manage prices in some family-run grocery store or warehouse in a former socialist country or what have you. The people using XP don't know they're even using an old OS, and they're oftentimes not very technical people (to say the least). They're using it because it's their job and they don't care particularly about it. It's usually not connected to the internet

Recently I went to the dentist, and while they weren't using XP, they were using Windows 7 to run some in-house software (I assume) to check my insurance

Yes, im from a former socialist country

I've seen some recent examples of XP in the wild, they pop-up occasionally in old ATMs, bus route displays, small stores running a PoS, etc. Not a recommended configuration of course but still happens nevertheless.

For me I enjoy it as a fun/hobby OS. I can install all my favorite tools and games and boot it up whenever. It's also fun to see what modern work can still be done on old OSs. Recent versions of PuTTY work so I can in theory sit on my XP box and drive LLM agents with Winamp playing in the background, chat on MSN with Escargot, etc.

"What do people use XP for these days?"

Hacking.

I currently have DX12 operating on XP-x64 (basically consumer 64-bit Win Server 2k3) with some minor hardware recognition issues. I have many modern games running this way. Many of them run much faster under XP than under their officially-supported OS (Win10+) which is an absolute shame.

> I found it frustrating to use when it was new because of how often the system would lock up even on decent hardware

Kids those days. Windows "release version" was actually a beta version. NT 4 needed 6 SPs to become stable, Win2k needed 4 SPs and XP needed 2 SPs.

Open Watcom is still actively developed! Worth looking at.

The kind of passive infection that is shown in popular videos like this one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uSVVCmOH5w) tend to only happen if you hook up an XP machine to be directly accessible to the Internet. Like, if you connect your XP machine to your router sitting in the middle of your Internet connection and don't forward every port, you should be fine in that regard at least.

There is also Supermium which is a relatively recent version of Chromium backported to run on Windows XP with all the security patches that brings, but with that being said I still would not do anything security critical on it.

There were 2 separate risks bundled into this folklore.

One was it was common enough of to have a home internet setup without any inbound filtering external to the PC. That'd be nearly unheard of nowadays as nearly everyone has a router configured to perform as stateful firewall (the out of the box config of a home router, this system being the same underlying system that builds the session table for masquerade NAT). So you can have your XP machine sit there until the cows come home, nothing external is going to scan it anymore.

The other is just general "having internet access means malware can upload your information and download more malware". In practice for hacking with XP these days, that's "do you trust whatever you're copying over to mess with" and not an issue.

The only combination I'd caution against is "using XP as a daily driver for internet browsing" as there are unpatched security bugs in XP malware can target which don't require you to click anything, even in the somewhat more modern browser offerings. Even then, it's still just a matter of "how much do you care if this machine & the data on it get hacked" vs "how much do you want to do it that way" just like any other security question. There is no such thing as a universally agreed line on how much constitutes a bad risk in security.